There has been a growing proliferation of high-speed input/output interface standards directed toward various applications within the electronics industry. These standards generally address chip-to-chip interfaces, board-to-board interfaces, and box-to-box interfaces for a wide range of emerging applications, such as data packet processing, data bus bridges, and high-speed memory interfacing, to name but a few.
Certain programmable devices, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), can potentially handle a wide range of input/output interface standards because of their flexible programmable circuitry. A drawback of some programmable devices is that their input/output circuits are often dedicated to only one or to a few certain types of input/output interface standards. Consequently, if these input/output interface standards are not being provided to the programmable device, there is a corresponding loss of input/output functionality or bandwidth and a number of input/output pins may not be utilized. As a result, there is a need for programmable interface circuits that may be programmed to support a number of different types of input/output interface standards.